1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to firearms, and more particularly to firearms with one or more storage chambers or compartments in the firearms' hand grips, forearm stocks or butt stocks and a porting system for the discharge of gases at points along the length of the barrel when the ammunition is fired, and is particularly suited for firearms with multiple firing chambers for the ammunition.
2. Related Art
Hand grips, forearm stocks and butt stocks for guns have been known to include compartments for items, such as ammunition, batteries, cleaning tools, knife blades and other gear and equipment that may be used with a firearm or apart from the firearm. Some compartments are specially formed for ammunition, having individual holes for each round such as in U.S. Pat. No. 2,509,553 or a tube for a series of rounds such as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,952,896. Other compartments can be attached to the handle of the firearm but are separate from the handle and are not located within the handle itself such as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,697,368 which has a speedloader cartridge holder secured within a separate storage compartment that is secured to the butt of a firearm. Other compartments are merely cavities formed within the hand grip without any internal structure to secure the cartridges together within the cavity, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 2,805,507 which indicates that an inwardly facing blade separates two rows of cartridges but it does not secure the cartridges together within the internal cavity. Each of the prior art references are hereby incorporated by reference herein.
Firearms typically experience recoil and muzzle climb due to discharge gases when the firearm is fired. Recoil is created by a forward momentum of the bullet and results in a rearward acting force upon the firearm and the shooter. Additionally, muzzle climb creates an upward movement of the barrel when firing the firearm. Recoil and muzzle climb typically increase with the size of the bullet or projectile. Moreover, the weight of the firearm may also increase recoil and muzzle climb. Recoil and muzzle climb may cause shooters to flinch or hesitate when firing the firearm, thereby resulting in lost control of the firearm. Additionally, muzzle climb and recoil may lead to fatigue in the shooter and may inhibit the shooter's ability to fire the firearm long term. Recoil and muzzle climb further cause the firearm to move out of alignment with the target with each shot fired. As such, recoil and muzzle climb greatly decrease the shooters accuracy.
It is generally known to use ports or conduits formed in the barrel of the firearm to direct gas flow from the firearm so that recoil and muzzle climb are reduced. It is also known to provide a larger-diameter smooth bore barrel section following the smaller-diameter rifled bore barrel section to permit the expanding gases to flow past the bullet and reduce the peak pressure in the gun barrel to reduce the pressure adjacent the muzzle as the bullet exits the barrel. The variable-diameter bore can reduce the recoil and also has the benefit of increasing the bullet velocity. However, merely incorporating the traditional ported barrel designs into a variable-diameter bore barrel would not provide the improvements of either feature and could operate against each other, thereby reducing the effectiveness of these features. Accordingly, prior to the present invention, firearms have not been successful in combining the benefits of a ported barrel with a variable-diameter bore in a satisfactory way and a need remains for combining these benefits in a new way. It is also known to use wrenches and other tools that are not functioning parts of the firearm to remove and fasten interchangeable barrels on firearms, and it would be yet another benefit to use a functional feature of the firearm to remove and fasten such interchangeable barrels.
There also remains a need for a storage compartment that is formed as a cavity within the handle of a firearm and which securely stores the rounds of ammunition together. For firearms that have multiple chambers for firing the ammunition, there is also a particular need for a storage compartment which can hold multiple rounds of the ammunition that are secured together by a combined storage-firing clip so that the ammunition can be loaded into the firing chambers in the same arrangement in which they are stored and fired without having to remove the clip holding the rounds together.